Sunday, January 22, 2012

Tony Clement is the dumber than a sack of hammers and has a bag full of the stupidest ideas to hit government since the invention of the failed curved machine gun barrel.

In his six years in power, Stephen Harper has successfully positioned
the Conservatives as the party of neither the left, nor of the right,
but of the deeply stupid. And as Canadians have come to realize, when
Tony Clement is sent out to sell a policy, things are about to get
seriously neuronally challenged.

...

There is nothing wrong with trying to reduce red tape. Only
the most naïve statist could believe that every single one of the
alleged 2,600 regulations on business for which the federal government
is responsible are necessary. Those rules that aren’t should be
eliminated.

But equally naïve is the dopey libertarianism
that motivates the commission’s report, and Clement’s gleeful
endorsement of the one-for-one recommendation. Conservatives love these
sorts of things. They pull off the neat double-shot of catering to the
desired special interest while allowing the government to wrap itself in
a thin gauze of ideological principle.

...

To see how confused this is, try applying the one-for-one rule to
everything else the government does. How about, for every new law the
government wants to enact, it has to eliminate one. For every criminal
it wants to imprison, it has to release one. For every tax it wants to
cut, it has to increase another. For every cabinet member it wants to
add, it has to fire another.

...

... in his drunkard’s walk through Stephen Harper’s cabinet, from Health to
Industry to the Treasury Board, Tony Clement has earned a more precise
title: Minister of Everything Stupid.

Potter left out the part where Clement went to Denver to attend, (of all things), the US Democratic convention in the middle of a listeriosis crisis in Canadian meat packing plants.